Liberal naturalism

The term "liberal naturalism" was defined and popularized in 2004 by Mario De Caro & David Macarthur[1] and, independently, by Gregg Rosenberg.

[3] In De Caro's work, liberal naturalism is developed as a mild metaphysical realism; whereas in Macarthur's work liberal naturalism is associated with metaphysical quietism and opens into a philosophy of the manifest image.

For a liberal naturalist, many things in our everyday world that are not explicable (or not fully explicable) by science are, nonetheless, presupposed by science—e.g., tables, persons, artworks, institutions, rational norms and values.

Explaining such things might require non-scientific, non-supernatural resources according to this form of naturalism.

So, rather than tailoring their ontology to the posits of the successful sciences, as scientific naturalists do, liberal naturalists recognise the prima facie irreducible reality of everyday objects that are part of what Wilfrid Sellars called "the manifest image".